


Scorch The Ground

by ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes



Series: the occasional ghosts [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Disordered Eating, Fire Lord Zuko, Gen, He's such a fucking dumbass, Hurt No Comfort, Insomnia, Intermission, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, More difficult than previously thought, Sleep Deprivation, Sort Of, Zuko Angst, lots of poison, somebody take zuko away from me i keep hurting him, this is it getting worse, turns out: recovering from a lifetime of disassociation?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-07 11:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20975420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes/pseuds/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes
Summary: scorched earth policy; a scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that aims to destroy anything that might be useful to the enemy, even a countries own supplies.Going down.





	Scorch The Ground

**Author's Note:**

> You know a work is gonna be good when you start it by looking up 'poisons of the 18th century'. It's short, but I'm kind of just glad to post something.
> 
> -
> 
> PS, welcome to the spiral. Hope you're not enjoying this level too much, because after this it only goes down.

**i.**

The first assassination attempt happens three days into Zuko's rule as Fire Lord. He's sitting in his study, drafting a letter to the Earth Kingdom that keeps refusing to be good enough, when a servant places a bowl of rice next to him and leaves. He's about to eat it when he sees the thin white powder covering the top.

Normally, he'd assume it was just salt and move along, but his rumbling stomach doesn't even come close to beating out his paranoia.

He puts it on a shelf, grabs a book from his study _(It's his study now, not Father's, because Father is dead. He's dead, and he's gone, and he can't ever hurt anyone again. But the way Zuko still wakes up at night, sweat-soaked and thrashing, makes him wonder if he will ever really remember that) _on different types of poisons, and gets to work.

He goes to the Earth Kingdom section, on a hunch. Strychnine makes regular cameo's in his nightmares, now.

He gets right back to work afterwards and doesn't tell anyone. It slips his mind. He can't afford to waste any more time than he has to.

**ii.**

_(Zuko kind of thought that the numbering was going to stop after the different faces stopped, that life would just be one continuous motion after it, all with one person at the helm. But it doesn't, and he doesn't care about knowing why.)_

The second assassination attempt happens two weeks before the Avatar arrives and six days after the first one. He should be in his room _(But he had the nightmare again, the one where he kills Father but it's not Father it's Azula, staring back at him, and the kinds of chills he gets when he wakes are the same but her age is a toss of the dice)_ but he's sitting in Azula's, doing paperwork as she tries to sleep.

The guards outside of his door were murdered, someone tells him later that night. He did not know their names, but the letters hang around his head. He hollows out a place in his chest for them, a container to store their faces until he knows what to do with them.

He doesn't go to their funerals. There is still so much work to do.

**iii.**

_(The numbers make things more methodical, Zuko decides. Easier to deal with. The identities did the same thing, and he isn't totally certain he won't have to throw out this one, at the moment, but he's trying to make the person he was supposed to be work. And if splitting up his life into numbers helps, then who is he to tell Zuko to stop?_

_He _is_ Zuko. That's still not totally landed yet.)_

There is one more before The Avatar arrives. It's poison again. Cyanide, this time, which is easier to detect and a little more flattering than Strychnine. If he had to choose between the two, he'd choose the frothing at the mouth for a few seconds over the heart attack induced by days of anxiety.

He doesn't know if anyone would realize he'd been poisoned, in that case. He's anxious enough as it is.

**iv.**

Mai thinks he should sleep more. Zuko thinks that every minute he spends resting is a minute he could have spent preparing to get the soldiers still in the Earth Kingdom home.

She makes him sleep six hours that night, which is the most he's gotten since becoming Fire Lord. She makes him promise to keep doing it after she leaves. He doesn't.

Those six hours could have been used to negotiate prisoner exchanges, and now they've slipped down the drain. It's terrifying how much time he wastes on things he doesn't need.

The pressure in his head begins to mount, the older the cavern in his stomach becomes. But if he can't eat it while working, it's not worth it. 

**v.**

There is a certain kind of special terror that comes with standing in the middle of a crowded room and knowing only two things about the country outside it, one being that over twenty per cent of its population is stuck on another continent and the other being that you are the only person working to get them home.

A councilman places a hand on Zuko's shoulder from behind, and Zuko doesn't flinch as carefully as he can. The man, councilman Katsu, smiles with yellow tiger-shark-teeth. His voice drips down Zuko's neck like burnt sugar, still hot and uncrystallized. His breath smells like almonds. Zuko wonders if he sent the cyanide.

At his coronation ball, a woman bares her teeth and lets the words "Boy-king" seep out between the cracks with the stench of tequila. The words worm their way into his skull, even as Azula carts the woman off with all the social poise and delicacy Zuko will never master.

_(The thin lines between who Azula is and who Princess Azula is are growing thinner. He doesn't know how to help her mend the barrier when his own are crumbling beneath the strain. In the right lighting, her hands are laced with white powder. He worries for her more than himself.)_

**vi.**

Six and a half days before the Avatar arrives, the Palace chef forces Zuko into a chair, drops a plate in front of him, and refuses to leave until the Fire Lord eats at least half of it.

Zuko looks at the chef, whose name is speeding around, just out of reach, and blinks. Slowly.

It does not cross his mind that, if he really wanted to, he could just banish the man, execute him, even, for treating his Fire Lord like a toddler. His vision blurs.

He needs to go back to his work.

He can't remember what he was doing before now, but whatever it was, he needs to finish it before he can take this kind of time for something he doesn't need.

The chef notices his blank stare. "Please, Sir."

Zuko has left before the words on his tongue can solidify into anything worth speaking.

**vii.**

The next time Zuko sees Ty Lee after the war is over, she hugs him and then pulls back. Her hands come to rest on his shoulders, and she tilts her head back.

"You've lost a lot of weight," She says. Her fingers dance over the bones on his shoulders. He feels uncomfortably barren and exposed, like this, as if Ty Lee is picking open his scabs.

"It's alright," He replies, for lack of better things to say.

She frowns at him and doesn't bring it up again.

**viii.**

Sometimes, Zuko _(Prince Zuko, The Exile, whoever he is)_ wonders where his mother is. A dark corner of his mind likes to insist that she has become something far greater than an unconstant, that she will have already disappeared off the earth, that his chances have all slipped through his fingers.

The other, bigger, stronger parts of him have realised that there isn't any point in asking because seeing her is such an impossibility that it would be laughable if it didn't make him cold down to his bones.

Or perhaps that's just the cold that made it's home in him a while ago.

**ix.**

His eyes ache with the strain of staying up. As soon as all troops are properly withdrawn, and the Earth Kingdom generals start reading his letters, and the Fire Nation gets plunged into an inevitable economic collapse, his coffee will disappear, and he'll have the worst crash of his life.

A grimy part of him wants to hoard some of it for himself while he still can. While Earth Kingdom ports that don't look too hard at where their goods are going or at foolish thirteen-year-old exiles with fire in their lungs remain open and independent.

Zuko wonders, then, if there have been other kids in those ports like him, kids with magma for blood and a mission nothing can dissuade them from, have been there before him, have been there after him. He wonders if what they were searching for was exactly as useless as everyone else thought it was.

He hopes that, for their sake, it wasn't.

**x.**

Briefly, Zuko contemplates the pros and cons of murdering his entire council.

He sits in his chair _(Not throne, chair, he is not his father and he doesn't deserve to sit that far above everyone else),_ hands interlocked in front of his nose, stares ahead of him and thinks about young men and old men and what it's like to be angry.

If he's being honest with himself, Zuko is more bitter than angry, these days. He's forgotten what it feels like to be a dragon, to taste sparks on your tongue when you speak.

These days, when he speaks, everything tastes like bile.

"Boy-king," The councilmen insist with their smiles and carefully planned monologues. "Foolish king," They tell him when they show him their maps, dotted with unlisted cities that he knows the names of, that he can still smell on his tongue when he thinks about them from the right angle.

He would beg for them to listen if he thought it would change anything.

But Zuko is not a boy, and Zuko is not foolish, he is just very, very tired, so he does not.

Beneath the table, he Fire Bends, and it dances around his fingertips, prepared to unleash whenever he desires it to. He reins it all in. Pushes it down. It is good to push down fire into the bleeding places inside you, he knows.

It cauterizes the wounds that will not heal on their own.

The burned tissue it leaves behind, however, is third degree. You have to be careful if you want to make it out alive.

Something inside him disintegrates as councilman Araki speaks. He can cough up the dust in his bedroom, later, when there is time.

The dust settles when he sits down at his desk. He does not cough it up. There is never going to be time for things that don't matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Comment to give my dog the power of flight
> 
> Edit: My Tumblr is here- https://www.tumblr.com/blog/trashmanwilltakeyourbones
> 
> come yell at me


End file.
